If we can spend $1 trillion on the Iraq war, then we can afford $1 trillion for a new American Dream.

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But this is not just a question of affordability – it is a vision for the future. The Next Trillion can mark a turning point not only for the United States, but also for the world. We can use the current moment to begin to turn away from security through wealth and conquest and fundamentalism, and toward security through health and restoration on humanity’s journey toward compassion and non-violence.

Security through wealth made sense when the world’s natural resources seemed limitless, global population was small and the environmental impacts of economic growth were easily assimilated. Security through conquest made sense before nuclear weapons and global terrorism. Fundamentalism made sense in a world that had yet to see the picture of the Earth rising over the moon.

We stand, today, on the threshold of a different world, and our survival depends upon our ability to recognize this new reality and respond to it.

A sane analysis of the modern global economy recognizes that the financial return to which members of the club of beneficiaries became accustomed in the 20th century depends upon rates of growth – growth in population, acceleration of technology and capital markets, growth in consumption, increasing pollution, widening wealth gaps – that are unsustainable. The old worldviews, the old weapons, the old economic institutions are no longer adequate.

We can stand, here, frozen like deer in the headlights, or we can leap at the chance for change. We can affirm the definition of insanity – doing the same thing over and over again, but hoping for a different outcome (that is, using the violence-prone economics of Security Through Wealth and Conquest over and over again, but hoping for social equity, ecological balance and peace). Or, we can employ the same American boldness, the same spirit of risk-taking, and the same sense of moral urgency that impelled our ill-fated invasion of Iraq but turn it in a fundamentally new and beneficial direction.

In doing so, let us recognize that the Invisible Hand of the marketplace has been very good to many of us in the West over the last few hundred years, and, more recently, to many in emerging pockets of affluence around the world. Let us also recognize that in these early years of the 21st century, the Invisible Hand is pointing in a new direction. It is pointing past climate change, past toxics, past the loss of biodiversity, past depleted topsoil and over-fished fisheries, past favelas that house the poor in Latin America, past suburban sprawl and rural poverty, past the cul-de-sacs of consumerism and the gated communities of affluence.

It is pointing to The Next Trillion.

New Deal, Marshall Plan, Manhattan Project, Apollo Program: when America sets its mind to it, anything is possible.

Let us set our mind, then, to The Next Trillion.

Deployed with the requisite courage, vision and entrepreneurial acumen, it will unleash a commercial force of restoration and healing – a new era of sustainability and prosperity – the likes of which the world has never seen. And fit for a new president.

WOODY TASCH is chairman of Investors’ Circle, a San Francisco-based nonprofit network that, since 1992, has facilitated the flow of $112 million into 180 early stage companies and venture funds that promote sustainability. His upcoming book, Funny Money Honey and Other Flights of Financey, is about commerce, nature and imagination.

JIM FINEFROCK is former editor of the insight section of the San Francisco Chronicle. He has also served as the editorial page, op-ed editor and metropolitan editor at the San Francisco Examiner. He lives in the East Bay.